WebDesign

January 13, 2009

If you want to know more about what I'm interested in, check out the links I've bookmarked on delicious.com. The visualization on the right comes from the fun tag cloud tool at www.wordle.net.

Wordle provides tag clouds for lists of words, web pages, or delicious.com tags. Once the initial tag cloud is created, you can play with the format until you get a visualization that you like. You can then save it into the gallery.

There is a wordle blog ("News" in the banner) which highlights some of the interesting ways you can use wordle - from printing on mugs to using to teach spelling in a classroom.

For all the fun you can have with wordle, there are a few shortcomings:

Once you save a tag cloud, you cannot manipulate it further. You have to go back to the beginning if you want to create multiple versions of a tag cloud. So, if you are making tag clouds from a list of words, you need to re-enter that list for each tag cloud you generate.

There is a search, but it isn't readily available from the home page. You can find it by going into the gallery, though.

While you can save your wordles into a specified gallery (mine is called Laura Lee Dooley), you can't:

Having said that, wordle was created by Jonathan Feinberg in his spare time and was never meant to be a social media site - but I can't help imagine how much more valuable it would be if some of the standard social media elements were added . . .

August 06, 2008

As I was riding the metro into work today, I was thinking about the many projects I am working on this week.

I also thought about the tools I am working with and which have proven to be barriers to productivity rather than helps:

Proprietary CMS software: The house, fully furnished. The furniture is nailed down. The furniture is nice and fully functional in terms of what you need. You can bring in some new decorative items such as a vase or book, but you can't easily move the furniture around. And matching pieces are expensive.

Open source CMS: My experience is with Drupal (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP). You get the house for a reasonable price and you get the furniture -- LOTS of furniture. Sometimes too much furniture. You will definitely need to try a variety of pieces until you find those pieces that best reflect your taste. And you may need to have some furniture custom-made. But that's okay. 'Cause you can share your furniture designs with other people eager to see what neat design ideas you've come up with.

Software to build-your-own. My experience is with ColdFusion/SQLServer/Windows. You get the house for a one-time hefty fee. But you have ultimate flexibility to paint the walls whatever color you want and to create all your own furnishings. But it takes time, keen knowledge of your environment and inhabitants of your space, and clever use of your existing resources.

I believe different people get information in different ways. Some people love twitter. Others prefer a newspaper. Some like television. Others prefer to google their news. Some people (gasp!) prefer sit down meetings.

In order to reach a variety of people, you must reach out using a variety of information channels, tools and media.

In keeping with the focus on twitter, let's look at the two twitter accounts I manage:

http://twitter.com/worldresources. This account, updated by several staff, is used to share news of interest to and about my organization. The tweets aren't just about what WRI is doing, it serves as an aggregator of news we are interested in. And we strategically follow tweets that can help us in our work, so while we are posting, we are also listening.

http://twitter.com/lldoolj2. My personal twitter account is used to follow online marketing, web analytics, and social media tweets as well as some environmental and personal twitter accounts. I also post more personal tweets, but always with an audience in mind that is broader than just my family and friends.

Depending on the nature of the tweet, these twitter accounts feed into friendfeed, facebook, websites, my cell phone, tweetburner, google, etc. And some twitterfolk run their rss feeds and twitpics through twitter. All of this collaboration with the twitter framework makes the tweet even more valuable as a source of information about me or my organization. Plus, with a 140 character limit, you don't have to think hard about how you are going to craft the post like you do when you write a longer blog post. Simple and succinct and you've got an information tweet.

Having worked with this media on a regular basis I see we are quickly approaching a tipping point in maintaining our online spaces -- soon we will find that many of the currently separate, individualized tools we use online are going to be integrated into a few key tools that can be accessed through an individual desktop.

While some have tried to create desktops in the past, they have been confined to a certain architecture and information space. I have accounts with Google and Yahoo and Earthlink which try to pull together a set of tools into a desktop, but none of these pull together ALL the tools I use.

Creating a successful individual desktop requires a built-in flexibility for the individual to access and create links to an infinite combination of tools unique to their own needs.

Which leads to the questions:

How do we support such an infrastructure recognizing that in some cases we may need to maintain walls around proprietary, organizational, and private information (while still providing access to the verified user)?

As information walls fall down, so do institutional walls. How to we successfully navigate this landscape?

Make WebsiteGrader.com your first stop for understanding the technical quality of a website.

So, I thought I'd try it.

According to the blurb posted on the it's welcome page, Hubspot's Website Grader is a free seo tool
that measures the marketing effectiveness of a website. It provides a
score that incorporates things like website traffic, SEO, social
popularity and other technical factors. It also provides some basic
advice on how the website can be improved from a marketing perspective.

HubSpot's vision is to provide a (killer) marketing application and
provide great advice to small businesses so they can "get found" by more people and turn them into customers.

Specifically, Website Grader currently reports on:

On-Page Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Off-Page SEO

Blogosphere

Social Mediasphere

Converting Qualified Visitors to Leads

Competitive Intelligence

I plugged in the URL for World Resources Institute - www.wri.org. For this first go-around I did not include any competing sites. After a short pause while the Website Grader logo bug gyrated on the screen, I got my result.

92 out of 100.

Pretty good, huh?

But then I read the evaluation and discovered some discrepancies.

WEBSITE GRADER RESULTS

On-Page Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

PageTitle. Deemed too long. We were encouraged to cut it back to 70 characters.

Metatags. We were chastised for not adding the meta description and meta keywords). I remembered debates several years back that indicated that since metatags weren't useful for SEO, they were virtually obsolete. SEO Logic has a good post about the importance of metatags, which they believe are still useful. [Unfortunately, the page isn't dated, so I don't know how old this post is.]

Images. WRI got an okay rating on this, except for concern about our image use.
WebsiteGrader felt we used too many images so the user might have to
wait longer (to allow the images to download) to view our page. Oh,
yes. And we need to make sure all our images have ALT tags.

Off-Page SEO

WRI came out okay there with some cool information about our Google Rank and the ability to find our site in Yahoo, DMOZ, and ZoomInfo.

Blogosphere

Not so good. But that was mainly because Website Grader couldn't find WRI's listing in Technorati. Yes, we are in Technorati and have been for some time. WRI has authority and a rank (which changes every so often).

WebGrader searched for RSS feeds and forms to calculate ability to convert visitors to leads. They found at least one form, but had a hard time finding WRI's RSS feeds. In fact, while WRI has 8 feeds worth of information you can access in the address bar of our website on every page, Website Grader came back with a report that "RSS Feed: Not Found".

Competitive Intelligence

Since I didn't select any competing websites for my initial test run of Website Grader, there wasn't a great deal of information available here. I did go back and plugin a couple of other URLs, but my overall ranking didn't change. Maybe it will change as they work out the kinks in during this BETA testing phase.

CONCLUSION

Okay, so Website Grader is in BETA. We all need to remember that. And because WebsiteGrader.com is still in BETA, they are interested in any feedback they can get.

But here are my initial thoughts.

As with all apps in BETA, things are going to change. But Website Grader provides some good information and areas to improve upon. Some of the problem areas are clearly BETA programming difficulties while others are areas WRI can easily address.

Given the number of freebie website ranking and comparison tools out there, adding another to our stockpile of analytics tools (Alexa, Compete, Google Trends, Technorati, BlogJuice) is useful. Especially when the tool can also offer suggestions for improvement.

It will be interesting to see how Hubspot rolls this tool out once it is out of BETA. Will they charge for the services? Currently, it doesn't warrant this. One thing for sure, pulling in more data (and getting the current data right) from a broader range of resources is what will make this tool worthwhile in the long term.

So, WRI came out pretty good. A relatively solid site, based on the available data and, according to Website Grader,

A website grade of 92/100 for www.wri.org
means that of the hundreds of thousands of websites that have
previously been evaluated, our algorithm has calculated that this site
scores higher than 92% of them in terms of its marketing effectiveness.
The algorithm uses a proprietary blend of over 50 different variables,
including search engine data, website structure, approximate traffic,
site performance, and others.

The software is
constantly being upgraded and the algorithm enhanced. The number of
potential recommendations provided by the tool is also increasing
frequently. Please check back often.

June 20, 2008

Not only do you have to go through multiple screens, but you have to review an auto-generated list of current diggs that might be your digg and double-check by hand that your digg hasn't been already submitted.

(Actually, like that feature as I've found some interesting stories that way.)

But it is such a laborious process to get a digg dugg that I am more likely to post to my del.icio.us account rather than post to digg.

I mean, who has time?!?

If digg wants to maintain it's marketshare, it is going to have to improve it's user interface.

color ads are read up to 42 percent more than similar ads in black and white.

color can be up to 85 percent of the reason people decide to buy.

According to Trendspotting, the color blue is dominating the web.
Blogger Taly Weiss predicts that innovative companies trying to achieve
attention will use more “daring” colors to compete with the dominating
blue. The new MySpace/ Facebook ought to be more of a fusion of colors
as some of the web experts suggested here.

The article concludes by pointing to the following useful links on color: